The Map of Time

by Félix J Palma

  For the most part, though, he simply wailed pitifully, oblivious to his surroundings, hopelessly alone with his own horror.

  The arrival of dawn, leisurely sweeping away the darkness, restored his sanity somewhat. Sounds of life reached him from the entrance to the alley. He stood up with difficulty, shivering in his servant’s crumpled, threadbare jacket, and walked out into the street, which was surprisingly lively.

  Noticing the flags hanging from the fronts of the buildings, Andrew realized it was Lord Mayor’s Day. Walking as upright as he could, he joined the crowd. His grubby attire drew no more attention than any ordinary tramp’s. He had no notion of where he was, but this did not matter, since he had nowhere to go and nothing to do. The first tavern he came to seemed as good a destination as any. It was better than being swept along on that human tide making its way to the Law Courts to watch the arrival of the new mayor, James Whitehead. The alcohol would warm his insides, and at the same time blur his thoughts until they were no longer a danger to him. The seedy public house was half empty. A strong smell of sausages and bacon coming from the kitchen made his stomach churn, and he secluded himself in the corner farthest from the stoves and ordered a bottle of wine. He was forced to place a handful of coins on the table in order to persuade the waiter to serve him. While he waited, he glanced at the other customers, reduced to a couple of regular patrons who were drinking in silence, oblivious to the clamor in the streets outside.

  One of them stared back at him, and Andrew felt a flash of sheer terror. Could he be the Ripper? Had he followed him there? He calmed down when he realized the man was too small to be a threat to anyone, but his hand was still shaking when he reached for the wine bottle. He knew now what man was capable of, any man, even that little fellow peacefully sipping his ale. He probably did not have the talent to paint the Sistine Chapel, but what Andrew could not be sure of was whether he was capable of ripping a person’s guts out and arranging their entrails around their body.

  He gazed out of the window. People were coming and going, carrying on their lives without the slightest token of respect. Why did they not notice that the world had changed, that it was no longer inhabitable? Andrew gave a deep sigh. The world had only changed for him. He leaned back in his seat and applied himself to getting drunk. After that, he would see. He glanced at the pile of money. He calculated he had enough to purchase every last drop of alcohol in the place, and so for the time being any other plan could wait. Sprawled over the bench, trying hard to prevent his mind from elaborating the simplest thought, Andrew let the day go by for everyone else, his numbness increasing by the minute as he drew closer to the edge of oblivion. But he was not too dazed to respond to the cry of a newspaper vendor.

  “Read all about it in the Star! Special edition: Jack the Ripper caught!” Andrew leapt to his feet. The Ripper caught? He could hardly believe his ears. He leaned out of the window and, screwing up his eyes, scoured the street until he glimpsed a boy selling newspapers on a corner. He beckoned him over and bought a copy from him through the window. With trembling hands, he cleared away several bottles and spread the newspaper out on the table.

  He had not misheard. “Jack the Ripper Caught!” the headline declared. Reading the article proved a slow and frustrating task due to his drunken state, but with patience and much blinking of his eyes he managed to decipher what was written. The article began by declaring that Jack the Ripper had committed his last ever crime the previous night. His victim was a prostitute of Welsh origin called Marie Jeannette Kelly, discovered in the room she rented in Miller’s Court, at number 26 Dorset Street.

  Andrew skipped the following paragraph listing in gory detail the gruesome mutilations the murderer had perpetrated on her and went straight to the description of his capture. The newspaper stated that less than an hour after committing the heinous crime, the murderer who had terrorized the East End for four months had been caught by George Lusk and his men. Apparently, a witness who preferred to remain anonymous had heard Marie Kelly’s screams and alerted the Vigilance Committee. Unhappily, they reached Miller’s Court too late, but had managed to corner the Ripper as he fled down Middlesex Street. At first, the murderer tried to deny his guilt but soon gave up after he was searched and the still warm heart of his victim was found in one of his pockets. The man’s name was Bryan Reese, and he worked as a cook on a merchant vessel, the Slip, which had docked at the Port of London from Barbados the previous July and would be setting sail again for the Caribbean the following week. During his interrogation by Frederick Abberline, the detective in charge of the investigation, Reese had confessed to the five murders of which he was accused, and had even shown his satisfaction at having been able to execute his final bloody act in the privacy of a room with a nice warm fire. He was tired of always having to kill in the street. “I knew I was going to follow that whore the moment I saw her,” the murderer had gloated, before going on to claim he had murdered his own mother, a prostitute like his victims, as soon as he was old enough to wield a knife, although this detail, which might have explained his behavior, had yet to be confirmed. Accompanying the article was a photogravure of the murderer, so that Andrew could finally see the face of the man he had bumped into in the gloom of Hanbury Street. His appearance was disappointing. He was an ordinary looking fellow, rather heavily built, with curly sideburns and a bushy moustache that drooped over his top lip. Despite his rather sinister smirk, which probably owed more to the conditions in which he had been photographed than anything else, Andrew had to admit this man might just as well be an honest baker as a ruthless killer. He certainly had none of the gruesome features Londoners” imaginations had ascribed to him. The following pages gave other related news items, such as the resignation of Sir Charles Warren following his acknowledgment of police incompetence in the case, or statements from Reese’s astonished fellow seamen on the cargo vessel, but Andrew already knew everything he wanted to know, and so he went back to the front page. From what he could work out, he had entered Marie Kelly’s little room moments after the murderer left and shortly before Lusk’s mob arrived, as if they were all keeping to a series of dance steps. He hated to think what would have happened had he delayed fleeing any longer and been discovered standing over Marie Kelly’s body by the Vigilance Committee. He had been lucky, he told himself. He tore out the first page, folded it and put it in his jacket pocket, then ordered another bottle to celebrate the fact that, despite his heart having been irreparably broken, at least he had escaped being beaten to a pulp by an angry mob.

  Eight years later, Andrew took that same cutting from his pocket. Like him, it was yellowed with age. How often had he reread it, recalling Marie Kelly’s horrific mutilations like a self-imposed penance? He had almost no other memories of the intervening years than this. What had he done during that time? It was difficult to say. He vaguely remembered Harold taking him home after scouring the various pubs and taverns in the vicinity and finding him passed out in that den. He had spent several days in bed with a fever, mostly ranting and suffering from nightmares in which Marie Kelly’s corpse lay stretched out on her bed, her insides strewn about the room in some indecipherable pattern, or in which he was slitting her open with a huge knife while Reese looked on approvingly. In one of the brief moments of clarity during his feverish haze, he was able to make out his father sitting stiffly on the edge of his bed, begging forgiveness for his behavior. But it was easy to apologize now that there was nothing to accept, now all he had to do was join in the theatrical display of grief the family, even Harold, had decided to put on for him as a mark of respect. Andrew waved his father away with an impatient gesture, which to his annoyance the proud William Harrington instantly took to be absolution, judging from the smile of satisfaction on his face as he left the room, as though he had just sealed a successful business deal.

  William Harrington had wanted to clear his conscience and that was what he had done, whether his son liked it or not. Now he could forget the whole matter and
get back to business. Andrew did not really care in the end: he and his father had never seen eye to eye and were not likely to do so now.

  He recovered from his fever too late to attend Marie Kelly’s funeral, but not her killer’s execution. The Ripper was hanged at Wandsworth Prison, despite the objections of several doctors, who maintained Reese’s brain was a precious jewel worthy of scientific study, for in its bumps and folds the crimes he was predestined to commit since birth must of necessity be recorded. Andrew attended almost in spite of himself, and watched as the executioner snuffed out Reese’s life without this bringing back Marie Kelly’s or those of her fellow whores. Things did not work like that; the Creator knew nothing of bartering, only of retribution. At most, a child might have been born at the very moment when the rope snapped the Ripper’s neck, but bringing back the dead to life was another matter. Perhaps that explained why so many had begun to doubt His power and even to question whether it was really He who had created the world. That same afternoon, a spark from a lamp set alight the portrait of Marie Kelly hanging in the Winslow’s library. This at least was what his cousin said, who arrived just in time to put out the fire.

  Andrew Was grateful for Charles’s gesture, but the affair could not be ended so easily by removing the cause of it all.

  No, it was something that was impossible to deny. Thanks to his father’s generosity, Andrew got back his old life, but being reinstated as heir to the vast fortune his father and brother continued to amass meant nothing to him now. All that money could not heal the wound inside, although he soon realized that spending it in the opium dens of Poland Street did help. Too much drinking had made him immune to alcohol, but opium was a far more effective and gentler way of forgetting. Not for nothing had the ancient Greeks used it to treat a wide range of afflictions.

  Andrew began spending his days in the opium den sucking on his pipe lying on one of the hundreds of mattresses screened off by exotic curtains. In those rooms lined with flyblown mirrors that made their dimensions seem even more uncertain in the dim light cast by the gas lamps, Andrew fled his pain in the labyrinths of a shadowy, never-ending daydream. From time to time, a skinny Malay filled his pipe bowl for him, until Harold or his cousin pulled back the curtain and led him out. If Coleridge resorted to opium to alleviate the trifling pain of toothache, why should he not use it to dull the agony of a broken heart, he replied when Charles warned him of the dangers of addiction. As always his cousin was right, and although as his suffering abated Andrew stopped visiting the opium dens, for a while he was secretly obliged to carry vials of laudanum around with him.

  That period lasted two or three years, until the pain finally disappeared completely, giving way to something far worse: emptiness, lethargy, numbness. Those events had finished him, obliterated his will to live, severed his unique communication with the world, leaving him deaf and dumb, maneuvering him into a corner of the universe where nothing happened. He had turned into an automaton, a gloomy creature that lived out of habit, without hope, simply because life, real life, had no link to the way he spent his days, but occurred quietly inside him, like a silent miracle, whether he liked it or not. In short, he became a lost soul, shutting himself in his room by day and roaming Hyde Park by night like a ghost no longer concerned by the affairs of the living, to whom even the action of a flower coming into bud seemed rash, futile, and pointless. In the meantime, his cousin Charles had married one of the Keller sisters—Victoria or Madeleine, he could not remember which—and had purchased an elegant house in Elystan Street. This did not stop him from visiting Andrew nearly every day, and occasionally dragging him to his favorite brothels on the off chance that one of the new girls might have the necessary fire between her legs to rekindle his cousin’s dulled spirit. But to no avail; Andrew refused to be pulled out of the hole into which he had dug himself. To Charles—whose point of view I shall adopt at this juncture, if for the purposes of dramatic effect you will consent to this rather obvious switch of points of view within one paragraph—this showed the resignation of someone who has embraced the role of victim. After all, the world needed martyrs as evidence of the Creator’s cruelty, his ability to produce terrible fates. It was even conceivable that his cousin had come to view what had happened to him as an opportunity to search his soul, to venture into its darkest, most inhospitable regions. How many people go through life without experiencing pure pain? Andrew had known complete happiness and utter torment; he had used up his soul, so to speak, exhausted it completely. And now, comfortably installed with his pain, like a fakir on a bed of nails, he seemed to be awaiting who knew what: perhaps the applause signaling the end of the performance, because Charles was certain that if his cousin was still alive it was because he felt compelled to experience that pain to the hilt. It was irrelevant whether this was a practical study of suffering or to atone for his guilt. Once Andrew felt he had achieved this, he would take a last bow and leave the stage for good. Thus, each time Charles visited the Harrington mansion and found his cousin prone but still breathing, he heaved a sigh of relief. And when he arrived back home empty-handed, convinced that anything he might be able to do for Andrew was useless, he began to reflect how strange life could be, how flimsy and unpredictable it was if it could be altered so drastically by the mere purchase of a painting. Was it within his power to change it again? Could he alter the path his cousin’s life would take before it was too late? He did not know. The only thing he was certain of was that, given everyone else’s indifference, if he did not try, no one else would.

  In the little room on Dorset Street, Andrew opened the cutting and read for the last time, as though it were a prayer, the account of Marie Kelly’s mutilations. Then he folded it up again and replaced it in his coat pocket. He contemplated the bed, which bore no trace of what had happened there eight years before. But that was the only thing that was different; everything else remained unchanged: the blackened mirror, somewhere inside which the crime had been immortalized, Marie Kelly’s little perfume bottles, the closet where her clothes still hung, even the ashes in the hearth left from the fire the Ripper had lit to make slitting her open cozier. He could think of no better place to take his own life. He placed the barrel of the revolver under his jaw and crooked his finger around the trigger. Those walls would be splattered with blood once more, and far away on the distant moon, his soul would at last take up its place in the little hollow awaiting him in Marie Kelly’s bed.

  6

  With the revolver barrel digging into the flesh beneath his jaw, and his finger poised on the trigger, Andrew reflected about how strange it felt to have come to this. He had chosen to bring about his own death even though most of his life he had, like everyone else, been content merely to fear it, imagine it in every illness, see it lurking treacherously all around him in a world full of precipices, sharp objects, thin ice, and jumpy horses, mocking the fragility of those who claimed to be kings of Creation. All that worrying about death, he thought, only to embrace it now. But that was how things were: it was enough to find life a sterile, unrewarding exercise to want to end it, and there was only one way to do that.

  And he had to confess the vague unease he felt was in no way existential. Dying itself did not worry him in the least, because fear of death, whether it was a bridge to a biblical universe or a plank artfully suspended above the void, always derived from the certainty that the world went on without us, like a dog after its ticks have been removed. Broadly speaking, then, pulling the trigger meant pulling out of the game, relinquishing any possibility of being dealt a better hand in the next round. But Andrew doubted this could happen anyway. He had lost all faith. He did not believe fate had any reward in store for him that could make up for the pain he had suffered, above all because he did not believe such a recompense existed. He was afraid of something far more mundane: the pain he would doubtless feel when the bullet shattered his jaw. Naturally, it would not be pleasant, but it was part of his plan, and therefore something he must accept. He
felt his finger grow heavy as it rested on the trigger and he gritted his teeth, prepared to put an end to his tragic life.

  Just then, a knock came on the door. Startled, Andrew opened his eyes. Who could this be? Had McCarthy seen him arrive and come to ask for money to fix the window? The knocking became more insistent. That accursed money-grubber. If the man had the gall to stick his snout through the hole in the window, Andrew would not hesitate to shoot him. What did it matter now if he broke the absurd commandment about not killing your fellow man, especially if that man happened to be McCarthy? “Andrew, I know you’re in there. Open the door.” With a bitter grimace, Andrew recognized his cousin Charles’s voice. Charles, Charles, always following him everywhere, looking out for him. He would have preferred it to be McCarthy. He could not shoot Charles. How had his cousin found him? And why did he go on trying when Andrew himself had long since given up? “Go away Charles, I’m busy,” he cried.

  “Don’t do it, Andrew! I’ve found a way of saving Marie!” “Saving Marie?” Andrew laughed grimly. He had to admit his cousin had imagination, although this was verging on bad taste.

  “Perhaps I should remind you Marie is dead,” he shouted. “She was murdered in this miserable room eight years ago. When I could have saved her, I didn’t. How can we save her now, Charles, by traveling in time?” “Exactly,” his cousin replied, slipping something beneath the door.

  Andrew glanced at it with a vague curiosity. It looked like a leaflet.

  “Read it, Andrew,” his cousin implored, speaking to him through the broken window. “Please read it.” Andrew felt rather ashamed that his cousin should see him like that, the revolver pressed ridiculously against his jaw, which was perhaps not the most suitable place if you wanted to blow your head off. Knowing his cousin would not go away, he lowered the gun with an exasperated sigh, placed it on the bed, and rose to fetch the piece of paper.